The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [8]
Goodall's writings about the chimps at Gombe helped me come to terms with and value my singleness. Invested with a more anthropological and philosophical view of our one-parent household, I attempted to peel away the many-layered fiction of American family life and the eighties consensus view that single mothering was somehow a new and aberrant condition.
When did men not go to sea, to war, set out on seasonal hunts, get lost, die of smallpox, malaria, die in the woods with handwritten wills frozen to their chests? When did they not board ships for a new world, secure a place on a wagon train going west? Were the months-, often years-long absences irrelevant to their children's lives? Sanctioned or not by traditional values, isn't absence still absence? And through those absences, who fed the children, sang to them? Under whose single care might we document that we grew?
As Stephen enters such a troubled adolescence, I've found myself poring over Goodall's book once more in regard to the behavior of adolescent chimps: Adolescence is a difficult and frustrating time for some chimpanzees just as it is for some humans. Possibly it is worse for males
in both species…One of the most stabilizing factors for
the adolescent male may well be his relationship to his mother… .
A few nights later, the door softly closes and I pull on again the black sweatshirt and pants from Stephen's drawer. Just now he and I are almost the same height and weight. I've tucked some money in my sock, but tonight Stephen cuts down the terraced steps toward Washington Street and past the T-stop. He wears his backpack and I can hear the ball bearings rattling in the paint cans as he bounces down the long flight of stairs.
I follow him at a distance along Beacon, he on one side of the street, I on the other. I keep to the shadows of the awninged storefronts. To my relief Stephen is listening to his Walkman, which gives me greater ease in my movements. I can follow a bit closer without worrying that he'll hear me.
At the same time the fact of his rather distractedly bouncing down the street makes me evermore protective. Someone could jump him and he'd never know what hit him. I scan the streets, the openings to the many alleys. Stephen leads toward Boston. As I dart and stroll, hesitate when he is too clearly in view, I feel a strong pull toward home. Does Stephen feel anything like it? He certainly doesn't appear to.
We are almost to Fenway when he cuts left onto St. Mary's Street. At the corner two kids about his age step out of the convenience store. Stephen stops and removes his headphones. There's an exchange. On the spot I decide that if violence erupts, I'll blow my cover, step in.
Though I know I can't stop a fight all by myself, I'm banking on the surprise factor, pulling off my hood and cap, shaking out my hair to reveal myself as mother on the
scene…When he is attacked… there is little a mother can
do, but she usually hurries to see what is going on, and may utter waa barks in the background… .
But the boys join Stephen as they make their way behind the apartments, stopping at a fence to toss part of a Slim Jim to a dog. Maybe the boys feed the dog to keep him from barking. Stephen kneels a moment. He reaches his fingers through the wire mesh fence and scratches the animal on his head. Then the boys head off again toward Commonwealth, cross the viaduct, and disappear. Crouching along the rail, a few cars whizzing by beneath, I follow.
When I reach the other side, I peer down the path between high dead weeds to an old trestle. Even from a distance, in the midst of the rubble grown up around it, the trestle retains something of the baroque vision of its builders, elaborate scrolls and buttresses written into the behemoth stone and concrete structure.
Here and there off the path, the